Is DCF commonly adhered to in other colour managed viewing (not editor) applications? I honestly don't know.
In all resources I've found so far it's been described as an Digital camera (removable storage) filesystem standard.
In some places I read it's used to indicate that the image editor should embed an sRGB ICC profile. After which the DCF tag can be either removed or left in.
Further on I find that exif/dcf is not a maintained standard, but camera manufacturers often still adhere to them which makes them de-facto but not real standards. ICC colour profiles on the other hand are a standard.
Since the vast majority of images online are in sRGB colour-space, when no profile is embedded it seems like a safe default to assume sRGB. Of course a downside is wider gamut (e.g.AdobeRGB) content which is growing will be rendered worse when no profile is present. Which leads to the other conclusion drawn earlier by others: in this day and age it's better to always embed one.